Navajo Bridge

Author's Comments

There are two bridges here, almost identical, separated by sixty-six years and a few hundred feet of air. The trick at Navajo Bridge is figuring out which one you are photographing and from where. The pedestrian deck of the old bridge gives you the better angle on the new one, and the geometry of the steel arch against the red walls of Marble Canyon is the photograph most people come for. It is a good photograph. It is not the one I keep returning for. What I want is the condors. They roost on the underside of the structure, sometimes on the cross beams directly below your feet, and when one launches into the canyon and rides the thermal up past the deck, the scale of the place suddenly clarifies in a way the bridge alone cannot deliver. Four hundred and seventy feet is an abstraction until something with a nine foot wingspan moves through it. Then you understand. Morning is when I shoot here. The east-facing canyon wall takes the early light first and the river below stays in shadow for another hour, which gives you a layered exposure - warm stone above, cool water beneath, the bridge itself somewhere in between. Winter mornings are coldest and clearest. Summer mornings are softer and the light comes earlier. Both work. Bring a longer lens than the wide shot suggests. The detail photographs here - rivets, the curve of the arch against sky, a condor's primary feathers backlit at the moment of takeoff - are what separate a real visit from a drive-by. And walk the full length of the historic bridge slowly. The view changes with every twenty feet.

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